My ex-boss once warned me as I was preparing for a board meeting
“In that room are 14 directors with 28 opinions, all of them will think they know marketing”. I was to brace for waves of “advices”. True enough, different questions and conversations with some of them amused me.
Once, a senior member of the board sent me an email asking
“I was in a social media presentation the other, I think we should do social media.” (He said this, two years after we had been sharing our best practices on social media marketing at conferences.)
And another person, quoted an article he read online to discredit the validity of performance marketing. Back then, helping this leader decipher the article was large part of our pitch to hire for a similar role.
They understand in parts and comment in parts, they do so believing they really know what marketing is.
The reality is, doing it well is another story all together.
There are no short of skeptics. Clearly, many people who don’t see the value of marketing.
I was once asked,
“Why do you need to do marketing for NTUC FairPrice since it’s such a homegrown grocery retailer brand in Singapore? Singaporeans all shop there, don’t they?”
Marketing as a function is undervalued and misunderstood. The job now encompasses many things and is getting more complex. Even its practitioners have problems explaining their roles.
It’s no wonder that the ‘experts’ out there think that marketing job is a piece of cake. Is it really?
CMO’s Notes is a series of short reflections, inspirations and lessons from my career in marketing, comms and branding, more generally framed as “Marketing”. M in CMO really refers to “many” as there are many roles the CMOs of today need to live up to
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